Law Commons^™

A Critical Examination Of A Third Employment Category For On-Demand Work (In Comparative Perspective), Miriam A. Cherry, Antonio Aloisi

All Faculty Scholarship

A number of lawsuits in the United States are challenging the employment classification of workers in the platform economy. Employee status is a crucial gateway in determining entitlement to labor and employment law protections. In response to this uncertainty, some commentators have proposed an “intermediate”, “third,” or “hybrid” category, situated between the categories of “employee” and “independent contractor.”

After investigating the status of platform workers in the United States, the authors provide snapshot summaries of five legal systems that have experimented with implementing a legal tool similar to an intermediate category to cover non-standard workers: Canada, Italy, Spain, Germany, and …

Dependent Contractors' In The Gig Economy: A Comparative Approach, Miriam A. Cherry, Antonio Aloisi

All Faculty Scholarship

Lawsuits around the misclassification of workers in the on-demand economy have ballooned in the United States in recent years. That is because employee status is the gateway to many substantive legal rights. Inresponse, some commentators have proposed an in-between hybrid category just for for the gig economy. However, such an intermediate category is not new. In fact, it has existed in many countries for decades, producing successful results in some, and misadventure in others. We use a comparative approach to analyze the experiences of Canada, Italy, and Spain with the intermediate category. In Italy, the quasi-subordinate category created an opportunity …